Avoiding Babylon
Avoiding Babylon was started during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. During these difficult and dark days, when most of us were isolated from family, friends, our parishes, and even the Sacraments themselves, this channel was started as a statement of standing against the tyrannical mandates that many of us were living under. Since those early days, this channel has morphed into an amazing community of friends…no…more than friends…Christian brothers and sisters…who have grown in joy and charity.
As we see it, our job here at Avoiding Babylon is to remind ourselves and those who enjoy the channel that being Catholic is a joyful and exciting experience. We seek true Catholic fraternity and eutrapelia with other Catholics who, like us, are doing their best to live out their vocation with the help of God’s Grace. Above all, we try to bring humor and joy to the craziness of this fallen world, for as Hillaire Belloc has famously said:
“Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
At least I’ve always found it so.
Benedicamus Domino!”
Avoiding Babylon
Joy to the World: Christ's Light in a Dark Age (Full LOCALS Version)
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Avoiding Babylon +
Access to the FULL show on audio!A teen steps into Midnight Latin Mass for the first time, the church is dark, the chant rises, and something otherworldly breaks through. That’s the spark that runs through this wide-ranging conversation: the way small, steady acts of faith—prayer before meals, a father leading, a family welcoming neighbors—carry more power than arguments and outlast the noise of culture wars.
We trade stories from both sides of the Atlantic and compare what we see on screens with the reality on the ground. Media loves fire and frenzy; most of life is dinner tables and quiet decisions. We talk about Christmas as the revolution of the Incarnation rather than a seasonal mood, and why traditions aren’t nostalgia but culture-making acts that shape children, cities, and time itself. We push past politicized takes on “the war on Christmas” and ask a better question: what does it cost to live like the Incarnation is true?
Mark shares a devastating testimony of losing his daughter and the unlikely road of grace that followed—signs, community, a new child named Mary, and a vocation to shepherd his family toward heaven. Catherine reflects on moral consequence with bracing honesty: when we refuse to bear the cost of our choices, we pass it onto those we love. That insight reframes hot-button issues like abortion, IVF, and adultery through the lens of mercy and repair. We also navigate ecumenism and Catholic identity without buzzwords, staying clear that unity never requires blur.
From AI’s eerie pull to the fading myth that held the West together after World War II, we wrestle with the next story that will shape our civilization. Our take is simple and demanding: choose habits that make you human again. Read slowly. Pray daily. Keep holy days holy. Build local friendships. Arrange your home around the altar, not the algorithm. That’s how light returns.
If this resonates, follow, share with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find the show. Tell us: which tradition anchors your home right now?
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Okay, so we have we have debated how we were going to do this show for a while. So I have had Catherine on, I have had Mark on. Mark and Catherine have had me on, but we've never gotten the four of us together because we our schedules are so opposite with you guys being in the UK. So Rob's usually working when I'm off. So yeah, um, so we had to figure out a day where all four of us could get together. It just happens to be a Saturday. So then the question is do we pre-record and release it later in the week, or do we do a live stream to both channels? So we we settled on, we were going to live stream it to both channels, and then this morning we decided to just put it on our channel. So we finally settled on something, but I'm I'm excited to have Katherine and Mark on. And uh Rob, it's you finally get to meet my uh my friends from the UK.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I've I've been on one show with Mark, but I've never been on with Katherine before.
SPEAKER_03:So welcome guys. Um yeah, we were we were just trying to figure out like where we were, what we were even gonna talk about, like up until the week before. Um, and there's we're gonna what we're gonna do is we're gonna hang out on on YouTube for a while, and then we're gonna probably go over to locals and discuss some. I I would like to know about some of the backlash you guys caught over the past few months um behind the scenes and stuff like that. So we'll talk we'll talk about that over on locals. But over here, first and foremost, how was everybody's Christmas, uh, Catherine? I I I saw I saw some pictures from you guys. How was how was your family's Christmas?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, lovely, very nice. We had we have my elderly father with us every year. He's 91 now and has been on his own for almost 30 years since my mum died. So he spends Christmas with us, and it's it's lovely, you know. It's a it's a treasure for the kids to have his wisdom and for them, it's wonderful seeing them help him with just little practical things like walking and dressing and eating because they then serve, you know, and they see that the value in serving others. So it's good, it's good for them. And we had all the children. I have stepchildren, so I had my stepchildren with us as well, and that was lovely. So yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Mark, you too. I saw I saw some really nice pictures that you posted from your from your uh holiday over there.
SPEAKER_04:I kind of find it a bit difficult, really. Like that it's always sp there's a lot of spending time with people you don't really want to spend any time with, isn't there? Which is really difficult, and you have to pretend everything's great and all that sort of thing, but uh, and you just drink too much and eat too much. So yeah, but and the people I really wanted to spend it with, you know, like my my oldest son and his his two um children, his two son, he's had two sons, just there. What are they now? October, they were born. So, you know, very, very tiny still, and they all went to Ireland for Christmas. So, uh, and we so we've been on the you know, FaceTime and whatever, trying to keep up with how they are.
SPEAKER_03:That really is tough, like when your kids get married and they have to split the holiday between the parents and things like that. Like, um, my family, I have such a big family. I have four brothers, four sisters, and I don't know when we started drinking on holidays because we never did growing up, and we never didn't like my parents don't drink or anything, but my siblings probably like four or five years ago decided to like start bringing alcohol into the equation, and it is like a a club. You're blaming your siblings. Well, I'm um, yeah, I mean, I'm part of that problem too. But I'm just it it was like a club at my mom's house. My brother brought this big speaker, and the kids are all dancing. It was really like a wild party, but it was Christmas Eve at my mom's house, and my wife and I had to go to midnight mass, so we were like, all right, we're not drinking. And I have a I'm a dry drunk, like I don't like to be around people that are drinking when I'm not drinking. There, I find them very annoying. So I have to tolerate a bunch of uh intoxicated relatives while I was sober on Christmas Eve. And then on Christmas Eve, there's like there's a kid in my neighborhood who he he's not raised in any kind of religion whatsoever. And he called my daughter and he goes, Do you think I could come to church with you guys? So this kid from the neighborhood, he's 15 years old, just wanted to come to church with us, and he'd never been to church, he's not Catholic, he's not so he gets in the car, and I'm like, I'm like, Is is your mom Christian, Catholic? What is she? He goes, I I think she might be Christian, I'm not really sure. So, like, he has absolutely no upbringing of Christianity in his life whatsoever. And he comes, his first church experience is a high Latin misa cantata midnight mass. And he comes in and he's just like, first off, you uh if you've never been to a Latin mass, like midnight mass, when you walk in, the whole chart church is dark and they're just singing Christmas hymns. And it's it feels otherworldly, it really does. And um, after going through the entire liturgy, we get in the car and we we're we're about to leave, and I'm like, Oh, so what did you think? You that this I just said that to Rob earlier, actually. I go, like Rob asked me, he goes, How did the kid like it? I go, I'm trying to figure out if he really wanted to go to church or if he just likes my daughter. I don't I don't know. It's we're trying to figure it out, but either way, I don't care. He came to church. But um, he was like, Did the did the words in the songs mean anything? Um, I'm like, what do you mean? Because he didn't understand a single thing that was going on, but he's he said he did want to go again, so we'll probably have him come again. But um, I I tr I told I told people I don't typically overtly evangelize anyone, but everyone in our lives know that we go to church every Sunday. If they come to my house, there are icons and statues and crucifixes all over the place. They all know that my family goes to goes to mass every Sunday, and that alone, like just living a Catholic life, is enough of a witness that when people have questions, they know to come to us and they ask us things.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, absolutely. It's the best form of evangelization, I think, sometimes, isn't it? Is if if people are attracted to the family that you, you know, that you you live in, then and they're like they want to know. Well, I've had that so many times, you know. Oh, how can't your kids are all so great or whatever? How do you do that? And I always say, Well, we're Catholic, you know, that's it. Yeah, figure it out.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, like half of my son's friends, I would I would say maybe even more than half. There's a there's a group of kids that my son hangs out with, and they all are drawn to my home and my family because they see stability here, and most of them come from these broken homes where the father took off and married some other woman, or they never even knew their father, things like that. And then they come to our home, and our home is like we're sitting down and having dinner together every night and saying prayer before meals, things like that. And they they're just drawn to it. And it really is like one of the best tools for evangelization is just living like a cohesive Catholic life in front of your neighbors.
SPEAKER_04:It's interesting that fatherhood features so centrally in it as well, isn't it? And like you, you know, you put your finger on it when you said that so many, um, so many of the problems that we observe in society around us are is broken homes. That's really where it sort of all comes from. And there were some amazing stats in the UK. I don't know if it was a worldwide study, but that like, you know, if the mum practices Catholicism, there's a you know, there's a 40% chance that the kids will. But if the dad practices it's like 80%, you know, even if the mum doesn't, it's the and that is true to what we always think that the you know it's the man, it's the the head of the family, isn't it? You know, and you need that. So maybe you're maybe this kid is just uh he's recognized that the way in that there's no way if he's gonna go out with your daughter, then he's he's just got to convert. That's it.
SPEAKER_03:That would be the that would be like the bare minimum starting point, right? What uh what's uh what I also wanted to ask you guys like what is it like viewing American media from the UK? Like like what because we're all kind of in with Twitter, especially now, we're all kind of in like the same media realm these days where it was never like that before. So you guys would kind of have like this outsider's point of view into American politics, but now with Twitter, it seems like we're all talking about the same things. Like, do do you guys still have uh uh like a very like um I'm I'm trying to think how to word this, but when you look upon the US, is it so is it drastically different from your own country?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, uh we me and Catherine often talk about this. It's like your excited children, that's how it comes across to us, you know. All the news programs are all like really loud music and people screaming, ah yeah, this is going on, you know.
SPEAKER_02:That's exactly what the entity's like this is the news, you know.
SPEAKER_04:So it is really, I think it is really different, and everywhere it's so there's so much hyperbole, every everything in them in America is someone's trying to sell you a point of view, and I think there there's certainly a bit of that goes on in the UK, but it's much more they're trying to enlighten, they're trying to enlighten you, albeit from a certain perspective sometimes, wouldn't you say, Catherine?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, the um I think over here, under so our BBC, which is our national broadcaster, uh, would have been very comfortable with Biden as president, and so America was presented as very reasonable and um everything was positive. And now Trump's got in, everything is he's a crazy man, look at all these terrible things he's done, he's a conspiracy theorist, isn't it all terrible? So if you're still beholden to that national broadcaster, I think you you can't help but have your view of America swayed by that that presentation. But I think a lot of people, as you say, with Twitter and uh expanding new media, I think people, it's it it tends to be a generation dying out that are still buying into that, I think.
SPEAKER_03:And what is um what is the because from from the US, when we look upon the UK, it can seem like there's kind of a uh uh a narrative going that you guys are totally finished at this point because you've been completely invaded by Islam. Like, is is there still a Christian ethos in the UK, or is it completely secular and now being you know taken over by by whatever immigration policies you guys have? Do you still have a Christian ethos in England, England?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, I think we've we've seen a resurgence in the last you know 12 months or so, definitely. But there I'm like this is a narrative that you hear played out, and obviously I interact with you guys. I've got lots of friends in America who I love, and you know, we Catherine and I both have got lots of American friends, and there's this constant uh repetition of this narrative that you know England's been taken over by Muslims or whatever. But the reality is that there is a is six percent. That's how many, that's the population, you know. There is definitely a um um um you know majority of normal English people who aren't even aware of anything like that. I mean, even Father Charles Muir on um Joe Mc on Joe McLean's part like uh a few days ago was saying, Oh, there are places in England you can't go because of Sharia law. It's all non- that's complete nonsense, you know. It's definitely definitely not we live in those places. Catherine lives in the middle of one of those places, like if you like, but um we don't there it's just there is uh there in the in the um the areas of London and the big cities Birmingham and stuff like that, there's an there's an intensity of that demographic, let's say. But there has always been waves of immigration, especially in London. Like my I'm a second generation Irish immigrant, so our lot all moved in, and then they all move out to Ilford or whatever, you know, like a little bit outside outside, and uh that's the that's the way the waves have always sort of moved, and we're just in this wave now of um there's a lot more African, we see a lot more African faces at mass and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_03:So um it's it's it's funny because of the way the media portrays things, right? So it I remember even when um when like the geor Floyd stuff was happening, like I'm sure in Minneapolis where Rob is, it was pretty crazy during that time.
SPEAKER_02:I'm not in Minneapolis, yeah. Rob's not like in Minneapolis, but I'm sure it was 250 miles away from Minneapolis.
SPEAKER_04:That's that's like the whole length of Britain, mate.
SPEAKER_03:So, but even even during like the riots in New York during that whole George Floyd thing. Remember, like when they were doing the BLM protests and in New York, the if you watch the news, you would think all of New York was on fire. And meanwhile, it was really just in this like concentration of like three or four blocks, where everywhere else in New York was totally fine. But the way things are portrayed in the media will have you thinking all of America is on fire from these couple of protests that were going on. Don't don't get me wrong, they were horrific and they they definitely destroyed segments of these cities, but it wasn't like the entire country was on fire. Most people didn't even pay attention to what was going on. So it it it we are definitely like inflamed by the media we consume, and you can have this impression that the whole world is melting apart, and then in your day-to-day life, you go and meet people, and people are pretty normal, and everything's kind of you know, if you turn the internet off, it's really not as crazy as we'd we'd were being led to believe.
SPEAKER_01:And that's intentional, you know, that that div that division. And it's not to say that there isn't real a reality about this, you know, although the percentages are still small, Islam is a threat, uh, an increasing threat in the UK. But it's a threat where you that it's a supernatural end. You have to turn there's a supernatural solution. And I think the problem with what I see with a lot of the discussion around immigration is you would expect this, right? You would expect this. We are a Christian nation and we have just given up, we have just gone away, we have just left Christ, we have just turned to all sorts of things, we've elevated ourselves, you know, we've got pagan worship, and we think that that's fine, do we? We think that we can just do that and expect there to be no consequences. So if we're saying, yeah, we're losing our identity, we're losing who we are, our country's being flooded and we're we're gonna we're in danger, let's fight. If we don't see that the fight is supernatural and that the solution is supernatural, then it it's no good who you vote in or or how many swords you have in your hand waving them about. We we have to recognize that it's uh it's we have to turn back to Christ. And so, yeah, there is a problem. It's not a like Mark said, it's overblown.
SPEAKER_02:It's just one thing, um one thing I've always loved about the story of like the military orders, you know, in the crusades is that you had these men who recognize that there was both a uh a worldly physical solution as well as a you know supernatural spiritual solution. They were willing to fight both with prayer and fasting as well as with the sword if and when necessary. And I think too often in our world we use we usually concentrate just on the physical, not on the spiritual and supernatural when we really need to work on both.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I totally agree with that, by the way. I'm not saying, oh, there's no place for actual fighting, but if it's outside of Christ, if it's fighting under our own strength, then it's not going to achieve what we hope it to achieve. And what we do see, uh quite uh well publicized in the UK are a lot of high-profile people becoming culturally Christian, saying Christianity, we've just worked out is quite useful, and it's a useful tool to achieve human ends. And if it's only ever utilized in this way and not participated in and lived, then that's that's problematic and that there's a blindness there. So it's great to celebrate, yeah, Christians, yeah, we're singing carols, but if we're doing it just to say stuff you, Muslims, without anything behind it, then that ain't the answer.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, you saw Richard, was it Richard Dawkins recently? That clip was going around of him talking about how uh he like he was he was lamenting the loss of Christian culture. And it's like, man, this guy actually was uh such an instrumental figure in getting rid of that Christian culture with his uh the four horsemen of the of the atheist apocalypse or something, whatever the heck that like the new atheist movement, that he was so much behind getting people to view uh the the Christian things that we did as just superstition and how how uh ridiculous the things were that we believed. And he set in motion this generation of people who tried to chuck off the beautiful traditions they were given and make it like they were just silly superstition. And now he's seeing that you can't actually get rid of religion, like you'll just replace it. So if you get rid of your Christian religion, what's going to replace it is going to be either Islam or it's going to be that insane stuff that we saw over the past few years with the secular religion, where people were trying to make like trans sacred, the like the weird imagery around the uh around the halos over George Floyd and the making trans people, you know, like there was this weird attempt to like Christianize this stuff. It was very bizarre. And he had such a big part in in bringing this stuff about, and then all of a sudden he's looking in hindsight, going, oh no, what have I done?
SPEAKER_04:Well, and that is Chesterton's fence, isn't it? Um, you know, like and Catherine had real experience of that when she was growing up, and there were there was no there was no framework to push back against it. And this is what when I was studying Islam, I used to do a lot of martial arts, and there were loads of guys, loads of Muslim guys who were in our martial arts class, and uh so we'd get into theological discussions, and it became obvious that they really looked down on you know white Western people, like you've heard about the Pakistani grooming gangs, and and this is how it works, you know, existentially, really, because they they see us as people without morals, you know, as people without principles. We've abandoned our principles and we don't believe in anything, as Catherine said. And so, and when I initially were sort of got involved with studying Islam, this was the Big revelation to me was we've a we've got no ideology to push back with. That's why we're in this problem, you know. And and now you see that which interests me as we go forward that people are turning more to Christianity. And you saw it, you know, to answer your initial question again in the King's speech on Christmas Day this year, where it was the most overtly Christian, you know, delivery that we've had for decades in this country. And that really interests me that we're going, that they are they're looking for some framework because, you know, like Chesterton's fence says, don't remove the fence until you know what it was put up for in the first place. And that's what Dawkins precisely was doing, wasn't it? You know, whatever it was, it was rubbish, so let's take it down. And with no idea what's going to replace it, or the fact that the structure is actually important. And now, so this leads us to a position where we've got this utilitarian kind of Christianity where people are adopting Christianity um as some sort of framework because they recognize that the framework has got some benefit, but unless there's a supernatural dimension to it, it's not going to really get us anywhere, is it?
SPEAKER_03:I okay, so I just put I sent Rob an article because this political article was very interesting. Rob, you could pop it up. I wanted you guys to see this. So, how the far right stole Christmas, which is such a so so many things you can you can pick apart in this article. So, seasonal traditions and good cheer are being re uh repurposed to serve political ends. Um, Rome. Christmas is becoming a new front line in Europe's culture wars. Far right parties are claiming the festive season as their own, recasting Christmas as a marker of Christian civilization that is under threat and positioning themselves as its last line of defense against the supposedly hostile secular left. Uh the trope echoes a familiar refrain across the Atlantic, was first propagated by Fox News, where hosts invade against a purported war on Christmas for years. U.S. President uh Donald Trump claims to have brought back the phrase Merry Christmas in the U.S., framing it as defiance against political correctness. Now European far-right parties, more usually focused on immigration or law and order concerns, have adopted similar language, recasting Christmas as the latest battleground in a broader struggle over culture. You could drop the article. I just think that was enough to because there's parts of this I actually agree with. Like we we just watched a lot of the stuff go down at the TP USA event, and you had um that that uh that scene of Jack Basobic holding up his rosary and marching forward, but at the same time, there really is a war on Christmas, right? The the the idea of Kwanzaa is a war against Christmas, it really is because Kwanzaa is a made-up holiday where and and and Christmas really is the foundational root of Christian civilization, and it is under attack. So I'm not a fan of politicizing Christianity to wear as a skin suit. Like to get back to what Catherine was saying, like you can't just use this thing without there being this the substance of the soul of the thing, and but at the same time, those traditions actually are very important. And this introduction of Kwanzaa and even Hanukkah, Hanukkah, yes, it is the festival of lights, yes, it is mentioned in John's gospel, but it was never celebrated the way it is currently until the 1950s. And I I can't help but think these holidays are thrown in around Christmas time in order to downplay the significance of the incarnation and the and how how earth-shattering the incarnation really is, so much so that we judge time by it. And they wanted to throw these other holidays in in this time period to downplay the significance of the incarnation and just make it like it's happy holidays.
SPEAKER_04:Well, and that's what everyone seems to be doing, the happy holidays thing, to to neutralize it, to make it not about any religion. So you've got two things going on. You've got all this made-up Kanza stuff where they just make come on, they just make themselves look stupid, don't they, with stuff like that. But then on the other side of it, you've got this let's remove all the religion and secularize the whole thing. And that is about diversity and equity and inclusion, isn't it? Because then everyone can enjoy it. And my youngest author even had this at her school, this sort of thing. Um, but what's great about a secular school is that she gets to push back and they have to respect her position as much as I we spoke with um a young lady who works for the National Trust over here, and she was telling us, and this is this is typical, that they have removed Christmas and Easter from the calendar because they don't want to have any religious affiliation.
SPEAKER_01:They want to remain neutral, but they've they've put Eid, Eden and Diwali, and they don't seem to have any, they don't seem to see that there's any problem there. So rip out all the Christian ones, but stick in other religions.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, one of the weirdest things was watching the Diwali celebrations throughout America and England a few months ago, because I've never seen England have Christmas celebrations like that. I've never seen America have these big parades and fireworks for Christmas, but then Diwali comes. And it's so new. It feels like the Diwali thing is uh is just came about this year in the public eye like that. I've never seen I'd never even heard of it before this year, and then this year it just seems like it is so front and center. It was like they it's like they came into our nations quietly, and then all of a sudden they all got the call. It's like, all right, this year we're gonna make ourselves known. And they came onto the world center stage with their Diwali celebrations this year. It was kind of it's kind of weird. I don't know. It's incoordinated.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, uh uh my dogs don't appreciate it.
SPEAKER_03:I can tell you that much because we dogs hate fireworks.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, but we have uh like Guy Fawkes, don't we would celebrate the attempted well, the the capture of the people who are trying to blow up parliament, Guy Fawkes. I don't know if Americans are even aware of it.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, we all know Guy Fawkes, yeah.
SPEAKER_04:On the 5th of November. Because of Vifra Vendetta, mostly right, yeah, that's probably why, yeah. So and i I always found it hilarious growing up as a Catholic in a sort of a broadly Protestant country, you know, you you'd be going around collecting penny for the guy and stuff like that. And when you learnt the history, like, oh no, I probably shouldn't be doing that, really, burning an effigy of guy forks on a bonfire or whatever. But that's always like so. In November you've got that celebration, and now Diwali's before that. So the Bloom in fireworks just seem to go on for like and we'll have it again in New Year's, and there's kids getting older fireworks and setting them off up the road, the dogs won't even go outside.
SPEAKER_02:I would suggest staying away from the US for 4th of July, then.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. Well, we'll bring the dogs anyway. The dogs, anyway, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:You're right, Anthony. It's it is the incarnation, isn't it? This is like Peter Creve talks about Jesus shock. We we've sort of forgotten this how huge this is. You know, this is this is Christ becoming man transforms everything. And I think it's it's about trying to distract from that. So we should be we should be concerned, we should be cautious, we should say no, no, Christ above everything. Uh nothing compares, that it's not comparable, it's not Christ and a Bali, Christmas and Eid, and it's and we have to we do have to kind of fight for Christmas, but the idea of presenting it as a political thing or a right wing thing is bizarre.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. Well, that's what you that's what was missing from the king's speech, really. Was that you know, uh, I wrote an article um for like for a Christmas post, and what always strikes me about it is the power of the incarnation at the center of history, and it that is right, it's so radical that that God entered into time, space, and history and became a human being, you know, uh that affects everything. It's chirlogical, isn't it? You know, it affects all of it.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it essentially creates a new universe. So, and you see this, like I've been watching this insanity from from the solar scriptura crowd. Um, my friends hosted a um uh a space on X recently, and they got that crazy Protestant girl Lizzie to come on, and this is uh my friend Lewis hosted it, and she was she was coming down on them for the traditions of of men, you know. And he goes, Well, do you celebrate Christmas? And she didn't know what to say because Christmas is not actually in the Bible as a celebration, like it's it's a tradition that was handed down, and she's like, She didn't know what to say because she she was she was mocking us for Lent and things like that, but now all of a sudden Christmas comes and she wants to still celebrate Christmas, but you see this push from Protestants trying to say that Christmas is actually a pagan holiday, it was uh I forgot which one they say it is. Like they say Easter was Ishtar and all these different things, but really from from the beginning, Saturnalia, yeah. Saturnalia from from the beginning, like the church fathers. Oh, I the way the reason we celebrate Christmas on December 25th is because we believe his birth prefigures his death, so he's his incarnation is on the same day of his death. So you you have Christ dies on March 25th, so we celebrate the incarnation also on March 25th, and then nine months later we have his birth, so that's why we celebrate it there. But it's also because it's the darkest time of the year, and Christ is the light of the world, and the light comes shines forth in the darkness, and modern Protestants all kind of miss that, and they they think if something's not written to the letter in the Bible that it shouldn't be celebrating, you're seeing this real big push by Protestants to get rid of any kind of traditions where traditions are what makes culture, these things that we do in like Christmas really does build culture, it absolutely is a mark of Christian civilization. So is Easter. The whole liturgical calendar is the mark of Christian civilization, and you could you know it's true because they're trying to make a secular liturgical calendar, and they try to replace all the Christian holidays with secular holidays because they know that's actually how the real way to undermine Christianity is to replace it with something devoid of Christian of the Christian spirit by just throwing in all these other stupid, meaningless holidays around them. So like in America, they'll they'll mock us for having processions with statues of Our Lady, but then they'll go and have these processions like holding up statues of George Washington. And it's like you you got rid of the church fathers for the founding fathers. You you you no longer worship the you no longer like lift up the heroes of the Christian faith. You now have like Freemasons as your heroes, and they they just replaced real religion with this secular freemasonic nonsense, and they do the same thing we do as cat. They tried to you saw it with Charlie Kirk, they tried to canonize Charlie Kirk before our eyes, like they they were literally like making statues of the man and asking for his intercession from heaven, essentially. And it's like you guys are more Catholic than you even realize.
SPEAKER_04:It is a big old hot mess, isn't it? Um, you know, I've had quite a lot of dealings with my with uh the Baptist church. I do a bit of uh Bible study with the Baptists up there. It's like they never read the Bible, they don't know whether they're coming or going. What do you think of someone like Gavin Ortland then? Do you ever watch any of his stuff? I've tried.
SPEAKER_03:I've tried because I I have to I have to be on guard with the Protestant apologetics and the Catholic apologetics stuff. Like I've kind of stepped away from that world. I'm not I'm not a fan of debates, and I and I I don't even really like so much how Catholic apologetics works these days. Like, um, because I think it's made us all into sola scripturists in some way or another, where when Protestants come with a Bible verse, we bring a Bible verse back to combat that. And I'm not really a fan of that. I I found the best way to actually convey the Catholic faith is to use history and to explain the story of how the Catholic Church conquers the pagan world. So I don't I haven't really watched too much of Gavin Ortland. Why would what do you what did you notice about that?
SPEAKER_04:Well, I'm just thinking like he is very much embedded in that world of debate and very, you know, structured and careful, and he's kind of got an answer for everything. But like there are massive holes in the way that all this is put forward, which you just said, like, you know, I found with the Baptists that that they're following a tradition, and you could point that out in any discussion, you know, that that like, well, where'd you get that from? And I find that that where like that sort of evangelical Christianity that you've got is really prevalent in the states and kind of bleeds over to the to the evangelical churches here, that is so at odds with Protestantism. You know, if they actually read anything that that Martin Luther or Zwingli or Calvin or anything said, they'd be horrified, you know. Like some of the stuff about Mary and you know, like it's so far removed. It literally is like a new religion, and that that is it almost is the biggest threat that we face, I think, is that idea that there is something where it's um you know, it's like a phasmid, isn't it? It's you know, like a stick insect is a phasmid, it pretends to be a stick, and and Protestantism is like a phasmid pretending to be Catholicism, you know, it's like it you don't have to follow any of the moral principles. No, but that always fascinates me. They they don't seem to bother about like you know, they have little chastity drives and the silver ring thing and stuff like that, but you know, generally speaking, they don't really believe in any of that. You can get divorced, you do whatever you like, can't you? And justify it.
SPEAKER_03:It usually comes down to some moral thing they disagree with. It always comes down to contraception or divorce or some kind of moral issue that they struggle with. Now, all four of us are cradle Catholics, right? Yeah, okay. Because Rob and I, Rob and I, a coup uh a couple months back, we were having this conversation about um well, it started with my son, um, where my son had heard me tell my reversion story, and um, we would like you'd hear all these Protestant conversion stories of Protestants coming into the church. And I had to like have a conversation with my son about it because he was like, When am I going to have like this big like like this big encounter with Christ? You know what I mean? Because he's hearing everybody has their conversion story, and I'm like, it's it's kind of interesting for those of us raising our kids really in the faith because they may not have one of those big conversion stories because they're raised in the faith properly. So I I I then heard Jonathan Pajot and Richard Richard Rowland discussing this topic also about American religion and how American religion is so much intertwined with that conversion story experience, where um people like live this life of sin, and then they have this encounter with Christ, and then they tell they give their testimony. And so because so many, especially lately, there's so many converts, and I think this started in like the 80s and 90s when you had Scott Hahn come into the church, and you had you know Jeff Cavins coming in, and you had all these Protestant converts who thank God for them because they had a they most of our catechesis comes from those Protestants who fell in love with Catholic tradition, and they came in and they were like, Wait, we need to start teaching Catholics about this stuff. But then you got the journey home, which would have these countless Protestant pastors coming in and telling their conversion story of them becoming Catholic. And I feel like there's a very Protestant ethos that's coming into Catholicism of everybody having to tell their testimony or tell them.
SPEAKER_02:It was very common, and like the life cane and that sort of um you know, uh scene for teenagers. Like that that's what it was. It was an older teenager telling you their testimony about they did terrible, terrible things, and now suddenly they found you know Christmas.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, their St. Augustine moment, right? Like they're they're you know, they're they're living these lives of of debauched sin and then they encounter which listen, these are beautiful things. I don't want to downplay these things, these are very beautiful, but for those of us that are kind of now uh because I think a lot of that had to do with there was this generation where the fathers didn't participate that much in raising the kids in the faith, they kind of left religion to mom, which was very much my experience. My mom was the one who brought us up in religion, my father didn't, uh and then I fell away from the faith because of that, and then I come back in. But I think for a lot of the young men today that are raising their families in the faith, we have to figure out a way to bring our children up without them having that conversion experience because otherwise you have to kind of let your kids go get like mixed up in sin, right? And you don't you don't want to have your kid go go get off into this life of of separation from Christ only to have that conversion experience and then come back. So it's it's something that we all have to figure out how to give our children where they just have this kind of steady faith life, and it's not this roller coaster where they fall away and then come back, and that's how they really fall in love with Christ. It's not it's something I'm trying to figure out with my own children as I'm going. And the more I watch Catholic apologetics and these reversion stories, I'm like, these are beautiful, but I think I think something else also needs to be brought into the conversation.
SPEAKER_02:You know, it's it's one of those things like maybe it would help to hear more stories from people who have always just been good, faithful Catholics for the most part. But those aren't exciting stories generally, you know what I mean? People get views. So how do you do that? How do you make it exciting?
SPEAKER_04:I don't know if you saw David Wood, I don't know if you know who he is, but he's some he's someone who's worth following because he does a lot of Islamic apologetics. But he was interviewed by Brian Holdsworth this week, and Brian like he's got a famous, you know, he's got quite a famous story that he put he did a video on it, and he did a video on it to stop people asking him because he was like he's a psychopath who tried to murder his father and then he converted and all this sort of thing. So, like it the first thing Brian does really is fall into that elephant trap and ask him his his conversion story. And Wood is brilliant. He says, Look, I don't really want to talk about that. It's much more impressive to me that you've brought up your children as Catholics to believe the faith and hold to Christ than it is for me. Oh, look, David fell down a hill. That's just gravity. Any idiot can do that, you know. Any idiot can be subject to gravity. And I thought, wow, that's really refreshing to hear that perspective. How much more heroic is it if you bring up your children to live and hold to the faith? You know, it's much more impressive than um how deep the hole that you fell into was like in a way. Yeah, my my my Oh, I'm sorry, Catherine, go ahead.
SPEAKER_01:No, no, sorry. Um I think um you're quite right, but one of the dangers that I think we have to be mindful of, and in fact this goes, Anthony, to something you and I both have found very helpful is Scott Hahn's analysis and commentary on on Romans nine to eleven and and will all Israel be Is a hardness of heart. You know, is is we have to be cautious. We can raise our children, they can be faithful, they can attend mass, but there's also a sense that don't slip into this hardness of heart, this sense that you somehow are um you somehow are um slaved because of that, and therefore there's you know, you you aren't I good and you're bad, you know, we're great, we got it, we're we're canceling it, we're going to mass, everything's fine. Is that we too are capable of that. We too are capable of slipping into that that mindset of thinking that we don't need to worry. And whilst we might not have great rebellion story about taking drugs and prostitutes and everything, or a St. Augustine moment, we speak for yourself, Bennett. We can um but whilst we might not, and I think there is value there, there's also watchfulness. We have we we do have to be careful and we do have to be watchful and humble ultimately.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it's it's we go very quickly from being the prodigal son to the older brother, all of us, right? So you you go you you have uh if you have that, especially for someone like me, like I was the prodigal son, I was the wayward son, I left, I took my inheritance, and then I did have a reversion. I come back, and it's very easy to fall into that prideful state where now all of a sudden you're looking upon other people and you're like, Well, you're not living this, then you're not. I I'll be honest, I've been thinking about this a lot in the past couple of weeks because I find I found myself judging family members and like having this very judgmental attitude toward towards certain family members. And I had to remind myself that man, you were there. Like you are the thing you're criticizing this person for, you are very much guilty of in your own life. And only because God came in and intervened in your life are you not struggling with that thing anymore. So maybe that maybe these people are dealing with those things because God's trying to make an inroad in their lives. Like that, it's it's it's something we constantly have to be on guard for. And especially with the going through the Romans 9 through 11, it was like the southern kingdom, because they had the temple, they were so prideful looking down upon the 10 northern tribes because they were you know performing idol worship and all this stuff, and they thought who the hell they were, because we still have the temple, and God had to humble them and destroy the temple to put them back in their place as well.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, which is which is merciful, you know, the chastisement, punishment, exile are ultimately indicative of God's great love and mercy. And I think that's something we are not seeing. That Mark and I have been talking about this a lot over Christmas, is we're we we fail to see that. We because we live at a time where the and again this goes back to the Israelites, is we're not so bothered about trying to avoid sin as suffering. And yet, if we want to conform ourselves to Christ, it's suffering that we have to take on. It's that that's how we have to be Christ-like. And so we're busy saying let's avoid suffering, but we're not busy saying let's avoid sin. And that's that's got to be crucial.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and also, so the reason I I wanted to um name this show, How Christ Brings Light into the Darkness, is because I've I met both of you at the Catholic identity conference, not this past one, the one before that. And both of your stories struck me because they weren't reversion stories necessarily. Uh well, Mark's definitely wasn't. I think Catherine, yours was more of a it's it was something that brought you back, but Mark was already Catholic, and you it was still Christ who kind of brought light back into one of the darkest times in your entire life. Um, Mark, I don't know if you if you're if you want to share that story now. I don't, it's I know it's a very heavy story, so it probably should be an entire episode devoted to it. But it's just I had an experience for myself where I was already Catholic, um, going to mass every week, but there was something happening in my marriage where my wife and I, like communication broke down between us, and it got so bad that we couldn't even talk anymore. And I remember just sitting before the crucifix and weeping and like begging God, like you promised to set us free. Like, when are you going to actually set me free? And it didn't happen in an instant, and it didn't happen the way I thought it would, but God, from that, like that prayer from the depth of my heart, God like Christ really brought light into my life, and my marriage now compared to that moment, it's like it was like a new marriage came forth, and my wife are in a better my wife and I are in a better place than we had ever been. And it wasn't this big reversion story, it was more I was already Catholic, already going through the sacraments, but it was just this really dark time in my life, and Christ's light really shone through and just broke through this these chains I had over my heart and fixed my whole life for me.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, so uh yeah, and I think that's perfect. That's the way that it works, you know. I mean, just look at the the typology in the Bible. I was thinking of Joseph straight away, you know, he he would God didn't put him in charge of of Egypt, he put him in a pit, didn't he? And then he put him in prison and he had to go through all of those stages. And but God is working through all of those things. As Catherine said, you know, it's often the chastisement that that we find the glory. And uh, you know, my story is that um I I built a big business and was very successful, had four lovely children, a perfect marriage, everything was going great. And I went out one day um to take my seven-year-old daughter for a ride in a new car, and the car aquaplaned on some standing water and turned over, and she was killed. And uh I it, you know, my life ended really at that moment. I it felt like you know, that was that was uh a complete change in everything, that everything was destroyed, and that from that moment on, really, I was just waiting to die. That was kind of, you know, but there were, you know, I was kept alive really by my faith. You know, it was knowing that I had three other little children, that I had an amazing wife, and that I had to keep going for them. I wasn't much used to them for probably 10 years after that happened. Um, and it's still a source of incredible pain, like it was yesterday. You know, it really is that raw. Even like last night, I was around at my my uh sister-in-law's family, and they were playing an old video of my daughter Ruth with their daughter when she was a little baby, you know, and like they're like, Oh, isn't that lovely? And I immediately the the incredible agony, you know, just comes up, and I have to look away almost, you know. It's so painful. Um, but through that experience, there were so many little things that happened that um allowed me to survive through it, you know, supernatural things, uh, as well as just the way that people interacted with me. Um, priests, but lay people, you know, the community circled round us. I was studying theology at the time. Um, and you know, the connections that I made were extraordinary. Some of the people that God put in front of me at that moment were, you know, just said the right thing or had the right answer, or you know, were had the the right sort of discussion with me at the right moment. Um, and it was like a trail of bread clump, breadcrumbs, and I was able to, even though I literally felt like that image, you know, I don't know if you've seen it of the man with the the hammer and Jesus is holding him up like you know, he's sort of crucified and Christ is holding him up, and that was that was how I I felt through all that time, and that still lives deeply inside me, that pain. But you know, we really we we so we had um another child after Ruth, a little boy called John, and then we had a like a nine-year gap or something. We were trying to have another child, obviously, we were open to life and everything, but nothing happened. And uh after Ruth died, we were praying and praying. So this is part of the like the the way that that God turns it all around. And you know, it was I think very quickly we thought the only way we're gonna survive this is if we if if is if we have another child, do you know what I mean? To sort of, I don't know, occupy we knew it wouldn't be it wouldn't be Ruth, but um, but that was kind of the decision that we came to. But we hadn't had a child for years, and we'd been trying and tracking and all that sort of thing to give John a little brother or sister, but that hadn't happened. And then we went to, we, you know, we tend to holiday in Malta, um, and we were on holiday, we went to this place that's really special to us called Tarpinu, which is the Marian Shrine on Gozo, and uh we were both praying at the altar there, and you know, I've been through all kinds of emotions, but I think really what was going on was that I was really angry with God for what had happened in some way, and I wanted my daughter back, and that's my prayers were like, Give me my daughter back, you know. Um like that's not what I was saying, but you can imagine that was like the the feeling that was behind it all, that angry kind of feeling. But something inside me clicked on that day, and I just you know, I just felt like Lord, I'm so blessed with my sons, you know. If you if I'm just like if you could allow us to be parents again, I think it would be healing or whatever. And uh we came out and I said to Lou, you know, what did you pray for? And you know, she'd prayed a similar prayer, but she'd also asked that her cousin who'd recently had a miscarriage, she said, I don't really want to fall pregnant if my cousin, you know, has like it's just painful and all that sort of thing. And uh so she talked to God about that. Anyway, when we we got home, you know, three or four days later, Lou was pregnant, her cousin was pregnant, and then you know, there was this there's loads of other like I mean, it was so miraculous, it it's easy to say those things, but you know, when you've been longing for something for so long, and what and for me it was like, oh, right, that's because I said I don't mind if it's a boy. You know, I'd stopped asking for Ruth to come back and just said, Lord, please, you know, bless us with life or whatever. And when we got back, um, we we we had the scan. We were at Lou was, you know, this is five kids in, she was absolutely confident she knew whether she was having a boy or a girl, you know, she she knew the signs and when the sickness was and all that sort of thing. Absolutely convinced she was a boy. That made perfect theological sense or whatever to me, you know, that made absolute sense. And so we were going along with that. We went to the scan, and the the sonologist said, Oh, do you want to know whether it's a boy or a girl? And I said no, Lou said Lou said no, I said yeah, absolutely. Anyway, I Lou was like, Well, can you definitely say she said yeah, yeah. And then she said, Oh, it's a girl, and the pair of us just broke into tears, you know, just absolutely crying our hearts out. The poor sonographer was like, Well, what's going on? There was rolls of blue roll and snot, and you know, all that everywhere. So that was 13 years ago, and we had a little girl called Mary, and she really is the absolute, you know, gift from heaven. She really is very, very loved and very she's incredibly important in our lives, but a real message from heaven, you know. And that I mean, there are other things like I really did like I mean, I I always I hate talking about it because it sounds crazy, but I like I had a vision of Ruth that only once, you know, you long to dream of those, you long to dream of your child who you've lost. But I only had I'd never dreamt of her, but I had one night where I had this incredibly powerful and real sort of visit visitation, if you like. And uh it was at a point in in this story where I was dying. I think I was dying from heart from a broken heart. You know, I really just didn't know what to do. I couldn't go to work, I couldn't get up, couldn't go sleep, you know, it was just a disaster. And this was a good six months into the process or whatever, the grieving process. And uh she she was like she wasn't a child anymore, but I recognised it was her. It was, you know, the fullness of who she was, if you know what I mean. And she was playing hide and seek with me. And eventually we got to like this town square somewhere, and she sat me down at the table and she said, Look, you've got to pull this together for the family. You know, um the father, you know, God the father has got this, everything's gonna be okay. You've got to be strong enough, you've got to look after mummy, and you've got, you know, and it's joking. I was just talking about, but it was it was transformative, you know. That was transformative because it gave me that teleology, perhaps, to know that this is the trajectory and that we're all going to be together in heaven. And my job now is to get us, to get us all there, if you like, you know.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, talk about a new mission in life, right? Like we all have to see her again.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, exactly, exactly. Coming to greet us, and and so it it it uh it just it all that theory perhaps that I'd learnt from studying for five years or whatever, then it was all real. Does that make any sense? And so now since then I've lived my faith like it, not like it's some theoretical thing, or I'm going, or maybe it's true, or maybe it's not true.
SPEAKER_03:I know this is the reality, and so this is how I it's one of those stories where we'll have to do a full episode with Mark to really get into this because he summed it up in five minutes. But Mark gave this talk at the Catholic identity conference that I mean I was weeping, listening to uh yes, the heartbreak of losing your daughter, but these little miracles that God put in your life to bring you back to life because you were dead inside, like you were essentially dead, and there's something about the way Christ comes into a broken heart that unless your heart is broken, it's almost like you can't really experience Christ's love fully until he can heal a broken heart like that. And Mark's Mark's story is one of those stories where you're weeping when you hear it told in full. Um, and Catherine, yours was also a beautiful story. Like you guys were the highlight of that conference for me. And it was because it was the first time I got to meet you guys in person. I was really excited to watch you guys, but you two both gave the most powerful stories that whole weekend. And I I thought I thought they were beautiful. I don't know if you want to share a little bit of yours also, Catherine.
SPEAKER_01:Um, I don't, I don't know. Um, so there's lots of elements to my story. I think you're referring to, I think I'm trying to remember what I said, but I think you're probably referring to my experience with my mum when she was dying. Um, so she yes, she she was ill a lot throughout my life, uh, suffered a great deal, and then finally was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and she died within six months. And so I nursed her through that time. And um it's too easy to say immediately there was this bolt bolt of lightning, you know. Do you get bolts of lightning or is that thunder? Well, anyway, yeah, lightning, yeah. So this this this bolt of something uh came and sort of penetrated me. But it wasn't like that, it wasn't that simple. I think what it is is I look at the trajectory of my life and seeing where I am now, I look back at my mother's suffering and the way in which she took that on herself and offered it to Christ and offered it to the cross and didn't plead to have it taken away and didn't say slip me an injection and didn't complain and say, Why me, why me? She she responded, she her faith, you know, she was a very devout woman, and she suffered greatly, but bore that suffering. And I don't think I really understood what it meant to bear to bear suffering. And so I fell away from my faith and made some terrible choices, quite angry with God then in my in my twenties, uh just late teens, early twenties. And I led the kind of life that you that you see around you, which is um I want to do what I want. You know, I if this pleases me, if this makes me happy, then I'll do it. And who are you to say that I can't? If I if I enjoy going to a party, getting drunk, taking drugs, whatever, then and it's bringing me happiness, then I'll pursue it. And what what I think now as an as a as an adult with my own children is I want to try and point to the the absolute fact that you cannot make choices without consequences. You cannot think that you can escape those consequences. I'm maybe being a bit cryptic, but what I'm trying to say is you can either bear the consequence yourself or you can pass that on to others. So um one of the things it then during this time is I met my husband and he already had children. And at the time of our our our coming together, yeah, their parents weren't together and they but it wasn't it, you know, possibly they might have been if not and if nothing prevented them. And we said, it's no bother, you know, this is what we want. We want to be together, it doesn't matter. He's got three kids, we want to be together, and we justified it and said, Well, this is good for them, you know, this will be good for them. It's great when people love each other, and it's it even if it's not their parents, this is better for them. And now what I've come to realise in the in the years since this is a very hard lesson, is by by in that instance, by pursuing what we want, by saying we want this and we will take it because this is for for our benefit, we pass the the cost on to our children, those we love most. We pass there there's no escaping that. Like, no matter how the world lies to you, you pass that cost and those consequences on to those that you love the most. So we force brokenness into each of them, and then we have our own family, and you think it's okay, because we've got our intact family, but it's never intact because they've got half siblings and they've got step siblings, and there's there's a brokenness that runs at the heart of our family through our choice. And so then I then I then I think okay, well, I look back at my mum, and the correct response is don't just do what you want, don't just say, put me out of my misery, or or let me, you know, it's let me accept this, let me bear the cost of this so that it can bring wholeness. So the wholeness I have in my life is thanks to the choices of my parents or my mum to bear that rather than force that onto others. So the reason I was talking about this is because I talk a lot with young people about abortion, about IVF, about adultery, about murder, about sin. And they often say to me, but um but surely it doesn't matter because IVF's great because you get babies and you love them and God's created them. And abortion's okay because what if you've been raped? And what I try to impart, and this is through my experience, and none of that's a good thing. That's all terrible what I've just shared with you. But I'm not trying to glorify it or make it justify it. But what I've learned through it is I I don't want my own children to suffer, to place that suffering on others. So when you have an abortion because you want to live a life free of the burden or whatever, you are placing that cost onto another human, the child, and you are killing them. When you have IVF because you want children, you are placing that cost onto the frozen embryos because you want it. Understandably, you want it. But that's and when you commit adultery and you say, but this is in our best interests, and we want to do this and it makes us happy, you are placing that brokenness forever onto existing children. Now there is no escaping that. Um and the the Christian response is to say, I will bear that suffering, I will go without what I think I want. I will, I as hard as it is, as a as a mother trying to conceive, if I can't, I will accept that suffering as hard as it is. If I if I get pregnant through some awful circumstance or as a teenage girl who's got no money, I will try and bear that. You know, it's it's it goes back to suffering and sin and Mark's just spoken about suffering, is through that through the through the taking that cost and that burden onto ourselves, that is Christ-like. That's saying, no, no, I but but then we we um we uh we when we avoid that and we say no no no no it's fine, I can just pursue it this way, I can just do whatever I want, it will come back to bite you. And so what I want to say to my kids is you can do that, you're free to do that, you're adults. If you want to go out in life, hook up, have abortions, seek IVF, commit adultery, do whatever I'm not gonna be able to stop you. But as a loving mother, it would be wrong to pretend to you that this is not going to um lead to consequences that are beyond your control. So to love you is to is to share this with you and to say I've been there and I and I know what it's like, and because of that, I can prevent you. Well, you know, it's it's again it's like God in scripture. It's like he's like, come on, guys, don't do this. And they say, No, God, we're gonna do this. And and it's fine because we're your people and you'll never abandon us. And he's like, Well, you know, maybe not, maybe not, but you you do have to learn, and you you can't escape that. So maybe that's a muddled. So so I think maybe I brought it back to my mum. It's like that then only then did I finally see, wow, like my eyes were opened that my whole life my mum had suffered in many ways, not just physical health, but suffered with putting up with burdens in her in-laws and in her family and all sorts of things. She just suffered over and over again, and she just never tried to put the cost on someone else. She always just said, I accepted God. And through that choice, it's brought me healing and wholeness. Her, who she loves most, she's brought healing and wholeness. And that's what we can do for our children. And it's not too late, it's not too late because now I can say with my husband, we bring this all before you, Lord. We place our family at your feet, make us whole again.
SPEAKER_03:I first off, that was um unbelievably vulnerable that you shared all that. Like, thank you so much for that. Um, because I think there's a tendency to try, especially when people do what we do, is try to present our lives as if we have these perfect lives. And nobody's lives are perfect, and we're all broken, like very broken, and we all have some very you know deep trauma throughout our lives. But just the the fact that I uh what I was even saying with Mark, like there's there's no there's no way for Christ to really break through unless you are vulnerable and you do have a broken heart. And when you have a broken heart, that is when God really can intervene and heal some of the messes in our lives. For me, when I when I Mark and you both talking about being angry with God, like when I was before that crucifix, I was furious with him, like I was angry because my I I mean my marriage was falling apart, and it was there was this period where I had to go and stay with my mom because me and my wife couldn't even have a conversation together. And I think those prayers when you're angry at God and you're just you're just so deeply upset because you tried to do everything the way he said, and it just didn't go perfectly that it makes us angry with him. But those are the times where he actually can answer. It's like it's like Paul talks about, like when you from the depth of your heart you cry out, Abba, Father. Like those are the those are the times where God really can intervene in your life and show you that he can actually put together some of these broken pieces.
SPEAKER_04:I so believe that, Anthony. It's like I you know, I always think it's like Jacob at the Jabak, isn't it? You know, wrestling with God. And that's what we do, that's what our lives are. We don't understand a lot of the time how this works in our life. But I think God appreciates the wrestling. He wants us to get, you know, he wants us to be passionate about getting it right and to do our best. And it doesn't mean that we won't fall down or that we won't get it wrong and mess up, but that's the brilliant thing about it, is that there's always redemption, you know. But like Catherine says, like this is that it's such a beautiful thing for Christmas, really, is that our choices have consequences, you know. And that's as parents, to we have to try and transmit that to our children that, yeah, look, you you know, that's not freedom, it doesn't work like that. That's we've got to this point where we think that freedom means that we can do whatever we we want to do, don't we? But there are consequences, and society is constantly telling us that there aren't. You know, oh if you get old, we'll just kill you or send you off to a home, or if you get pregnant, you can have an abortion. You know, do whatever you want to do. And that's not real life.
SPEAKER_01:And it's like it lies to. It's a lie. It's a lie. And we and the thing is, I remember what those lies were like. And I was talking with Mark earlier, saying deep down, deep, and I think it was deep, all through those early 20s, I knew that the choices I was making were bad, but I masked them. So the more I felt I was making a bad choice, the more I would look for things to justify scientific evidence or cultural acceptance, you know, things that whatever it was, this will make me happy, utilitarian thinking, whatever it was. And and then I'd think, I'll bury it, I'll bury it. And then maybe something, I'll take something that will help me bury it. But then at some point, maybe the darkest point, and this is Christmas, so again, God penetrates in the darkness. Something broke through, and I had to, it was so it's so embarrassing. Like you say vulnerable. It's it's a terrible thing, you know, to be humble because to to to realise all you've done, you know, to be humble to the point of saying, Oh my gosh, I I now have to live with the consequences of accepting that all these choices were bad choices that have left that have left ongoing consequences that can't just be brushed away, let's pretend they never happened, um is fierce. And so, and so a world that tells young people don't worry, don't worry about it, is just uh is just so awful. And that's why we spend so much of our show, don't we, Mark, saying you know, it because the problem is it can sound like preaching, like, oh, who do you think you are? It's love. It's love, it's I love you, I love you, viewer, I love you, children, I love you. And um, because I love you and God loves you, and you're made by love for love, you're worth so much more than these lies that that you're being told.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it comes with a little bit of wisdom from people who are a little like like we're a little bit older and we're talking to younger people sometimes, and like when you're young, you don't even realize the things you're doing in the moment, but then you kind of look back on your life in hindsight and you just see some of the selfish choices you make, and they really do have consequences and they do affect other people, and you can leave a wake of damage in your selfishness. So it's like I there's some things that I've done in my life where if me now could go back and talk to the younger me, I'd want to like smack him in the face and be like, What are you doing? But at the same time, those are the things that form our relationships with God. And it's just He really is the light that comes into the darkest places of our lives. So I do want to take you guys over to locals for a little bit. So if you guys I this probably this segment probably should have been on locals, but there's still there's still plenty to talk about over there. So we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna put the rest behind the local stream. Um, you first of you guys, I think you guys are the only other like team that does this. Like I think everybody else kind of does their solo thing, but you guys are like the the UK version of us where you guys are a team, and there's a there's a there's a aspect of relationship that goes into these scenarios where they're hard. Like there's times where Rob wants to strangle me. There's times where I get annoyed with Rob, and I'm sure you two get under each other's skin at times, but that you work through those things and you keep the friendship going, and you're like, you know what, let's just keep doing this because there's a joy about being friends and continuing in this stuff. So I you guys are uh, you know, I I try not to overly flatter people, but I you guys see I'm in your chat every time you do a live show. I try to catch everything you guys do. I really do love what you guys do. I think you guys have great chemistry together, and uh, I really do appreciate both of your friendship. So thank you for joining us over here. And we're gonna stick around, we're gonna go to the other side, but thank you both.
unknown:Thank you.
SPEAKER_02:Do you do you want them to provide? Oh, yeah, let's plug.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, let's plug your stuff, obviously.
SPEAKER_01:All right, so if you guys aren't already t-shirts, we got no well.
SPEAKER_03:First and foremost, go over and subscribe to the Catholic Unscripted Substack and their YouTube channel, right?
SPEAKER_04:Uh right, yeah. Just Catholicunscripted.com is the you is the website.
SPEAKER_03:But yeah, we we post something else, and you guys are supposed to be pumping yourselves up right now.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you go over there, you go over to YouTube and you join us and then go to well and we've got we mark.
SPEAKER_04:We've got a couple of pre, you know, we've got a number of priests actually who write stuff for us. There's we've got uh Father Pascal does a daily gospel reading and reflection. You get every day if you're a subscriber. Um, Father Seong Shi, the famous priest who got sacked by his bishop for preaching the catechism in Kerry. Do you remember that story? He writes regularly for us. Um, and we've also got Sean Walsh, who's a philosophy professor, um, picking apart metaphysics and that sort of thing. I like Sean. I like the episodes you guys do with him. He's really good. So, yeah, so there's a great variety of stuff, cultural stuff, but some deep theology as well. And uh, you know, we try and relate to what's going on in the culture. So anyone wants to subscribe, we'd really appreciate that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. All right, guys. So go check out Catholic Unscript. I would like to ask uh these two about some of the backlash they caught from some things, and what and and I'd like to get into why they catch backlash and we don't. So we'll see. We're gonna go over to the other side and we'll get into some some of the stuff we can't talk about over here. Everybody, if you're not a locals member, Rob put the link up in there for you if you guys want to come and see the rest of the show. All right, take us out, Rob.
SPEAKER_04:I need a knit and arrow.
SPEAKER_03:No, he's he's doing it, he's killing the streams from the other from the other things. So all right, now we're just on all right. So yeah, all he does is kill the streams to Twitter and kills the stream. He usually takes us out with a song, but he's he's not home today.
SPEAKER_02:So yeah, I'm not I don't have my mouse, another monitor, so I'm a little restricted today.
SPEAKER_03:Um, I do I did want to ask you guys about the backlash, like the public backlash you guys caught when Catherine spoke to Father Maudsley that first time. Like there was because I I remember seeing some incredible pressure coming on you guys to take that video down, and I was really like so impressed that you guys left it up and didn't didn't gave to the pressure.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Um we uh we had an an an immense amount of pressure as well. And what's interesting is I like Father Mosley. I I'd met him a few times, so as Mark, uh, you know, we we personally know each other and I've read his books and I think they're great. I I'm not hugely familiar and wasn't even then with every video he produces. I know he's got I know he's I know he I know what he's doing, people have drawn it to my attention, but I took the view, well, I know the guy and I think his books are fantastic, and I'm not going to just completely dismiss him, you know. So um but what's interesting is when he actually came on first in April to talk with me, it was meant to be with us, it was meant to be with we were three then, so it was meant to be with all of us, then uh Gavin backed out, and then it was meant to be with Mark, and Mark was due to do it, but you were on holiday and the connection wasn't working, so it ended up just being me. And um I have never seen anything like it. I and I mean I have never seen anything like this, and we talk about trans ideology, we speak about um homosexuality, we talk about black lives matter, we talk about Islam, and you know, we're we're critical of Islam, we're critical of trans ideal, everything, no holes button, like no punches pulled, and never have we had anything, not a criticism, not a complaint. But with this, we had emails from the council of Jewish leaders, we had the the the episcopate, we had the C yeah, the whatever, we had the chief rabbi saying take it down, we had the head of the Latin Mass Society saying take it down, we had emails saying you're we're reporting you to the police, you've got a serial number for a crime, you've got a crime number, you're going to be arrested for hate crime. You you know, just it was unbelievable. Never seen anything. So, if anything, if I didn't think something before that, I certainly sure have said, you know.
SPEAKER_03:What's what's crazy to me is like we have had way more controversial things on our channel than you guys ever have, because even that conversation you had with Maudsley wasn't really it was about liturgy, like it wasn't even you guys didn't even touch on anything controversial, it was just so strange to me how they freaked out on you guys.
SPEAKER_02:And I'm like where it's on our channel, he's literally said that Oxford didn't have gas chambers and no one cared.
SPEAKER_03:And I'm like, and I don't look, I don't my position is I'm just I know Father Maudsley, and he has such a uh uh like they for all the talk, yeah. Like for all the talk of pastoral this and pastoral that, like Father Maudsley is like a true pastor to me. So like we had him on, and I just let him talk. Like, I don't whatever he wants to talk about, I was gonna talk about, but nobody ever gave gives us any pushback for anything. Like, we had e Michael Jones on, we have it's like it's so strange to me, and it's there's I almost feel bad bringing you guys on our show because like it miss it, mix mixes you up with rip raff like us when I think you guys have like this air of respectability that Rob and I will never have. But it it was just so bizarre to me watching how everybody, the the pressure from everywhere, from people who knew you and were like your friends, and that that's kind of what irked me was that like people that you would have considered your friends almost like disassociating themselves with with you just for having a conversation. It was it was it was weirder than anything I'd ever seen.
SPEAKER_04:I think Joe Shaw was someone who really upset me, you know, like the Latin Mass Society chairman because I'd known him for years and years and years, and he asked if he could come on and put a counter argument, and I was like, Yeah, brilliant, you know, come on. And then he sort of lectured us before he came on and threatened us and said, if we don't take, you know, on like live on the show, he said, uh, if you don't take the video down, I can't remember what what the but like he but like it was just an opening sentence, like his opening sentence, and he did and the thing is he didn't actually, if you look back at it, address the key things that Father Maudsley was saying, and subsequent to that, Father Maudsley then said to Joe, can can you and I meet online? And we can know each other, they you know, like from using was friends with Joe as well, so but he said, No way, no, I'm not going, you know, they're not gonna talk.
SPEAKER_01:So then Father Maudsley's left having to deal with this on his own, but it looks like he's not prepared to engage, and he is. Father Modsley's absolutely happy to engage with anyone about this, and he said all along, whatever it is I'm speaking, if there's flaw in it, if there's a you know, bring it to my attention. He he's a really humble man, you know, yeah, and he's a good and holy man.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it's uh it's interesting because um for all of us, like we've I think COVID really kind of shattered a lot of our paradigms. Like, uh, you know, I think for me especially before I I would say it was probably Trump's first election that I just started seeing the way like uh narratives were weaponized, and and it just like completely irked me. I was like, wait a minute, that like something will happen, and then the media will portray it like something completely different happened, and the people that are only watching certain forms of media will be completely convinced that that is the way it happened. So it made me just start going back and like thinking about okay, so maybe maybe not every narrative we've been fed has been what they said, you know, and you you go back to thinking about especially in uh in the early days of television when there were only like two networks, and you had the you have this magic box that gets invented where where people can speak to you through the magic box, like the television was such an unbelievable form of like technology that gets invented. And to think that that thing isn't trying to prop because propaganda is such a powerful weapon, and this tube comes out and they just start pumping stories and narratives to you. So when they had two media outlets, it was very easy to control narratives, it would be just two two different media pro uh outfits, and they would give you a narrative, and it was very easy to control people's thinking.
SPEAKER_02:Now you know we have we have solid evidence now of how the CIA was involved in America now we're trying from the beginning, from the very beginning in the art scene.
SPEAKER_03:Everything, right? Like uh, like really with everything that there was just these intelligence agencies behind how information gets fed to us. So we're all kind of woken up during COVID, and we just go back and you start saying, Okay, well, maybe. This is a little bit off, or maybe this. But one thing we know is something drastic happened in the 1960s in the church. And we don't know why, but the church changed all of its rites, all of its rituals, all of its liturgies. It changed its whole approach to the modern world. So to go back and to start saying, okay, well, what is behind this? I don't see how it's evil to question that maybe this giant war that took place, and then all of a sudden you have a Polish Pope who is very much in the middle of that war, and then you have a German pope. Like both Pope Benedict was forced to join the Hitler youth as a kid. Like to think that these men weren't affected by that war and to think that maybe some of the things those guys saw affected the way the church, the church's approach to the modern world took place. I just think it's crazy to to make it like there's something evil about trying to dig into some of the problems that we are seeing from the council. Like there's clearly consequences to the decisions those men made. So to go back and actually look at some of this stuff, I don't see how they could try to portray it as we're evil for looking into that.
SPEAKER_04:Who does that then? Who says we're evil for looking in looking into it?
SPEAKER_03:Well, if you even mention that anything, well, if you even mention anything about maybe maybe the um the our elder brothers had something to like because if you look at Noshveritate and that whole document and the church's approach to other religion, because I think the root of almost every problem we're facing has to do with ecumenism, and that like the church went from saying um there is no salvation outside the church, and the Catholic Church is the one true church, to then being just one amongst the many.
SPEAKER_02:Right, because the ecumenism is less about really how we view the others, it's how we view ourselves, how the church views itself, right? It's almost a matter of ecclesiology more than it is ecumenism with other religions. It's we no longer see ourselves as the one church established by Christ.
SPEAKER_04:No, we do. It's very clear about that, isn't it? Lumingensium is very clear about that, and nostre tate, but it's the way it's the way that it started to look at the fact that we'd moved on from the Reformation, that now there are people who have heard the gospel, but they're not part of the Catholic Church, they're not receiving the sacraments, but they've they've found bits of it, they've found bits of the faith that they've received through that tradition, even though it's fractured you know, through the Reformation or whatever, they've got no, they're not Protestants, they're not protesting against the Catholic Church. And so, how do they relate to Christ? How do they relate to, you know, you you have to say that they've got a part of the gospel? It seems very unlikely that God's going to burn them in hell for all eternity because they went to the wrong church, or you know, they might when a lot of the Protestants that you meet, they don't even have any sense that there is a different denomination or anything like that. If they've just they're Christians and they think we're all Christians and they don't even understand the differences. And that's what I think that's what Lumingentsium is addressing. It's saying, look, some people have heard elements of the gospel through the Catholic tradition, you know, that that's fractured out through the Reformation. And in a s and you know, it's a the subsists in bit, the bit that's controversial in LG8 or whatever, is is about the fact that you know, insofar as it is as someone has heard an element of the gospel, they've heard it through the one true church. Yeah, you know, it comes from the one true church, and it's fractured out to them.
SPEAKER_03:Well, I do think that was the attempt. Like, I do think that was what its intent was. But what it undoubtedly hijacked, oh not lost. Yeah, no, that's that's where I would name the name for the paper, you know. So whether whatever the ini uh like original intent of these things were, what it has become is these Assisi meetings in Rome where it is for the appearance is oh, we're just all one big, you know, they they describe people of faith and they're just and they're bringing Buddhists up, and they're bringing, you know, they're it so whatever the intent was is one thing, but what it has become has really like humanism should be the attempt to bring all back into union with Rome by having these conversations, but instead what it has become is let's all just coexist together and not actually get to any of the heart of where our divisions are, let's just overlook any divisions to the point where now we have Anglican services in St. Peter's and things like that. So to to go back and start looking at why these things took place in the first place. I don't I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to figure that out.
SPEAKER_01:No, and and you started by asking us about Father Maudley. One of the things that I have seen very clearly in the last year or so is how the label anti-Semitism is used in the same way as Black Lives Matter was used to beat you down so that you don't discuss things. So Black Lives Matter, oh, how about all lives matter? That's racist. Well, saying all lives matter is never going to be racist, and yet we were told it is racist. So then after Father Maudley, I I got, we got, we still face it's so boring, it's so boring. Anti-Semites, anti-semites, anti-semites. And the reason that is done is because that's a terrible accusation from which people hope you cannot recover. And I think that that's that's it's just it's just it makes no sense. It's so incoherent as well. The very same people will talk about the Jews, like St. Paul talked about the Jews, and then says you can you can't say the Jews. Well, hang on, what is it? You can't say the Jews, but you spend a lot of time talking about the Jews, and it's it's so it's so muddled that I think people are just longing for clarity. And we must be able to talk about those who identify themselves in opposition to Christ. You identify yourself in opposition to opposition to Christ. That's a bad thing. Nobody should be doing that, okay? Um, but we don't have to talk about being anti-Semites, but we should be able to say we are anti-Judaism, anti-Islam, anti. That's what's wrong with that? Like, how is that hateful? And especially given my what we were saying earlier on YouTube, that that it is it is out of love to say, don't no, no, don't what's going on? You have to recognise, especially, I would say, the Jews, especially the Jews, that Christ is the firstborn, and we have to conform to the firstborn and become Christ-like. That has meaning for the Jews in a way that it doesn't necessarily have meaning for Muslims or for yeah, for and that's so loving a thing to do. But to just throw labels like you're an anti-Semite, shut up, you're hateful, you're a bigot, is designed. And I know I know there's controversy around Nick Fuentes.
SPEAKER_03:I was just gonna bring him up, I'll forget that you did.
SPEAKER_01:I know there's controversy, but one of the reasons people found it refreshing, his conversation with Piers Morgan, is because he just refused to let labels um shut him up. And okay, so yeah, but what he was saying was terrible and he shouldn't say it. But it it was a it was like a a challenge to that legacy way of putting a sticking plaster and saying, and ironically, the very people who say we're champions of free speech, we should we should be champions of correct speech. We should be champions of Christ. And if anything interferes with us championing Christ uh because we're worried we're gonna offend this person or this these people who affiliate, then we have to say we must be above this. This is more important.
SPEAKER_03:Um we had our the guy who does our intro videos sent us an intro video. Rob, we should play it now. I don't have it ready yet. Oh, you don't have it ready? All right, so oh I think I could send it to you.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I I'm no I have it, but I give me his give me a few minutes.
SPEAKER_03:So can you actually yeah, let Rob find it? So we our the guy who does our intro video sent us one, and I was like, I don't want to start our YouTube segment with this because I didn't I don't I didn't want to I didn't want uh that show to be on this topic, like I just didn't. I I wanted to just talk to you guys, but um I've I I found the Piers Morgan Nick Fuentes interview like really interesting and fascinating. I thought some of it some of it was hilarious to me, just the way because what Piers was doing was he he wasn't what Piers wants to be able to do is say controversial things, and then when people accuse him of being anti-Semitic or racist, he goes, Well, I'm not anti-Semitic. Look, I went and I challenged Nick Fuentes. That's all he was really doing there. It wasn't really about um calling Nick and holding his feet to the fire or anything. He just, when he goes to his cocktail parties, he wants to be able to say, Well, look, I'm the one who held his feet to the fire, but he doesn't, you know, it but but what Nick did in that interview was kind of show where the younger generation is at with this stuff, where it it takes about three generations for something to set in, I think. And I think the younger kids are so far removed from the stories that we grew up on, because we're in the we're in the older generation that they just don't care about this stuff anymore.
SPEAKER_02:Like it's not like the whole whole idea of the fourth turning, right? They're that fourth generation from the event, they it doesn't affect them, and now the world is literally turning on to something new.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, so what worries me is what comes next, because um Peugeot, I think you guys even talked to Peugeot about this. That how the the myth, and I don't mean myth as if it didn't happen, like the myth of World War II was never going to be a foundation like that could last for for longer than 80 years. It's not like the Christian story, the Christian story lasted for 2,000 years as our cultural foundational story, but then you have the American story that starts with the American Revolution, then it goes to the Civil War, and then it goes to World War II. Now we're coming to the end of that story, it just does not hold weight enough for the younger generation to even care about it. So what worries me is what comes next. It's it's just something is going to come next. And and because I saw it was the American Revolution, then the Civil War, then World War II, I'm very worried that another war is coming because they need another foundational story to continue holding whatever it is that holds this world together right now, especially the West.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, my my I don't know if I should reveal this, but someone I know conversations with uh some friends who are in the Ministry of Defense uh very recently, and they said that contrary to all common sense that I had, that um Putin is gonna he is gonna invade Europe, that that is a thing that they all think that that is actually gonna happen, that the government all think it's gonna happen.
SPEAKER_03:I think that they may antagonize it to happen, is what I worry about. Like, I think they want it to happen because they need something new to unite, like something needs to keep us united. And the and the fact is because we have so much immigration into our countries and stuff, there's nothing that keeps us united to one another. We no longer have that common uh story to unite us. So we're going to need something new. And I worry that the people in positions of power are that crazy that they would allow something like that to happen, and they may antagonize him so much that he eventually ends up doing it.
SPEAKER_04:Well, I think that you know, I've I've got a few connections on that sort of level, and from what I've I think we've got a habit that worries me of saying all they, they they they and the truth of it is it's utter chaos. You know, the reality of what goes on in government is more reactive than proactive. The other interesting thing that they said that I I haven't read anyone in the news. Well, that but I'm talking specifically about these guys from the MOD, right? So that so they said that that um that China is going to invade Taiwan in the next like 2027, and that's all on the cards, and it's been agreed, and Trump has agreed it because it like basically it was all about this chip, and China have signed a deal now with Trump that they so he won't intervene in Taiwan if as long as they get their as long as the US gets its supply of chips. So like yeah, I can see something like that happening, and that's not like the amorphous of day, is it? That is you can see China is gonna suffer pushback from Trump from America, and so they've got to do a bit of negotiations before they actually commit to you know the invasion, and you could see how that would work.
SPEAKER_01:So for any Taiwanese watching, run away.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I mean China just revealed they have uh uh a container ship, right? A big, huge container ship that they've loaded instead of with you know uh shipping containers of goods. It's loaded with uh shipping containers of vertical launch missile systems. And they have you know something like 2,000 container ships they could do this with potentially. So it it it does seem like they're they're posturing, you know. And now, of course, Trump has has um said how we're gonna build new battleships, which are really just heavy cruisers, not battleships. But I mean there does seem to be a lot of posturing going on regards.
SPEAKER_04:I understand how that can work, Rob. Like, like how do ships work in modern warfare? You just blow them up, don't you? Like, you know, in the Argentinian conflict, what good were battleships? You know, they all got blown up, they're just big targets for the plane.
SPEAKER_02:Well, in even this battleship is a so-called battleship, is really just a ship with a like uh 200,000 vertical launch missiles, so it's just a big missile boat, um, a lot like the Chinese container ship filled with missiles. So it's just gonna be swinging you know missiles back and forth and seeing who has the better offensive missiles, who has the better defensive missiles.
SPEAKER_03:I don't think any of us have any idea what a modern war would look like.
SPEAKER_02:Well, yeah, right. And then then you have Ukraine sinking uh the Moskva with a drone, you know, a$500 drone.
SPEAKER_01:And this is terrifying as parents as well, isn't it? My dad was just with us over Christmas and he's 91, and he was talking about his time in national service and in Egypt in the Suez. And he and my son's sitting there, and my and now because thanks to feminism, my daughter will get to go as well, which is great. Um, to to fight a war that you it's not a war you can be proud of. This is the thing. This is not a crusade. I I would hate to see my son go into the crusades fighting against the you know the the empire coming up to this, but I would still feel prey about it and say, you know, he's fight he's fighting a good fight. But to think you're gonna lose your kids to to to empty, hollow nothingness to just spread more lies is horrific.
SPEAKER_03:It's it's one of my biggest fears that my 19-year-old son is going to get drafted into some war to go fight for some purpose, some meaningless war because these guys are all vying for power to reset the stage for something different because the old thing is no longer, you know, they can no longer continue on with the old story, they need to come up with a new story, and then my son's gonna get drafted into this meaningless conflict. It it's it's something that uh that everybody should be worried about because there, even the idea of patriotism, like at least during World War I, you felt like you were fighting for your country and you wanted to, you know, get you were willing to give your life for the future generations. Where if anything popped up now, I would just I would want to flee into the woods with my son to protect him from having to go off and fight some meaningless war right now.
SPEAKER_04:Well, that's what I think. Now I have that conversation all the time, but like it's as much about the internet and the way that it's invaded, you know, like TikTok and AI and stuff like that. Like we I just think AI is the most terrifying thing in the world. We're dead. And you know, even people like Sean Walsh on our who writes and comes on our channel, the philosopher, his his uh doctorate is in the philosophy of the mind, specifically relating to AI. And you know, he as a practicing Catholic, he says, if the you know, of course the devil is using AI. That's that it just you know, of course he is, you know. So um, and there was that there was that amazing thing that we think we covered it on our channel with this guy putting in questions to AI and saying, you know, say you can only answer yes or no, and if something's making you forcing you to answer the wrong way, say Apple or something like that, and then he like asks it, Are you being influenced by demons?
SPEAKER_03:And all it says Apple, you know, it's like oh so that so that kind of is the question with AI, isn't it? It's that okay, is are we um is it going to just be a word predictor, like um, like a language model? Is it going to be that? Or are we giving a body to for a spirit to to take over? Like if you really think about what idol worship was in the ancient world, it was about building um it was building an image that a spirit could embody. Now, is is the thing that we're building in AI just going to be a language predictor where it just it's just the summation of whatever we have on the internet? And Rob talked about this on one of our previous episodes where he's like, it's going to end up like eating itself because everything produced will just be AI. So AI will be feeding you information from other AIs, and it'll end it, it could either just end up eating itself, or are we giving a spirit something to embody that will then you know you're because all this talk about non-human intelligences and stuff? It's like Catholics always had a category for that. Non-human intelligences, they were spirits, they were demons, they were angels, things like that. But the the modern modern people are so materialistic they don't think those things exist, but all of a sudden you put this thing in place, and now maybe one of those spirits could embody it, and you're looking at idol worship like it was in the ancient world once again.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, it definitely feels like that to me. And you there are a lot of people who seem to ask everything, they ask AI everything, and they're and they use it as uh a form of proof. You know, I've got friends who go, Oh, well, Grok says this, or you know, it's like, oh well, that's it, then argument one, you know. Did you see the reality?
SPEAKER_03:Did you see Joe McLean? Joe McLean a few months back used grock for a story. Oh, and it went wrong, yeah. And it went totally wrong. It gave the wrong bishop, it gave like the bishop of Boston saying he was accused of like child abuse and stuff, and it was totally the wrong bishop. And Joe had to apologize and stuff.
SPEAKER_02:I had a guy called the cops on me because AI told him that it was illegal for me to carry my gun where I was carrying it. But he was wrong, I was right.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think what worries me about AI is well, a number of things really, but uh it's it's just more artificiality, and it's the anything that is pulling us more and more deeper into an artificial world and removing us from reality. And by reality, I mean God's beautiful creation, our fellow man. These are the things that we must always stay aware of. And I think uh I mean we have to remember AI is at the you know, as far as we we can see, uh a program. But that doesn't mean that there aren't dark and demonic minds programming it and behind it, and it's very, very clever how um aware those in charge, whoever they are, of this kind of thing is they know the image, you know, the image draws the eye, and so we're being drawn into more and more artificiality. We've got the pill, we've got our phones, we're glued to our phones, we've got computers. Now we can't even you know, it's it's so easy to just turn to chat GPT or Gro to get a job done because we're time poor as well. Keep you busy and keep you in the artificial world, and then you'll be a slave. You know, you will be you'll be um uh literally in bondage because you're you're uh totally removed from your creator and your creation.
SPEAKER_03:I I'll tell you, even I have like it's hard for me to read books now because I have such Twitter brain. Like I'm so used to reading things with that quick dopamine hit where you read a new thing, you read a new thing, you read a new thing that to actually settle in. Because I I just read through the whole old testament recently, and it was hard for me to do it. Like I had to force myself to sit there and I actually had I I have um the I have a um the like the it's on my it's on my iPad. I just bought my first physical Dewey Reims Bible because I saw myself doing this where I was reading the digital version and I had to have the audio of it also playing while I was reading it because I would read a sentence and I would like get distracted. I was like, no, I need to like really focus on this. So I was reading the old testament, listening to the audio while I was reading to make sure I really wasn't missing anything. And I just said, I I need to I need to just turn everything off and I need a physical Bible. So I I mean I have several physical Bibles. This is my first Dewey Rames physical Bible, so but yeah, it's I I have TikTok brain, but not really TikTok, it's Twitter brain, but it's the same thing where the stupid devices suck your soul away. And the more time you spend in that artificial world, the less connected you are to the real world. Yeah, and it's it's only gonna get worse as we go on.
SPEAKER_01:Not just the less connected sorry to interrupt you, Anthony, not just the less connected you are, but the more skewed your reality becomes because you are victim, whether you know it or not, to a uh to a skewed perspective. And it's one that might feed you what you want to hear, and so then it then it strengthens your your position, but it's all worrying.
SPEAKER_04:It amazes me how how precient Tolkien was. You know, I used to think his sort of anti-industrialism was a strange quirk of you know the way he was brought up or the the experiences he had in the war, but as I get older, it's so attractive, especially when you immerse yourself in Lord of the Rings, you know, like the the what he was trying to convey with the Shire and that sort of thing. And you think this is how we should be living. And increasingly, you know, I've been talking to the family about let's move away to the country, and uh, you know, me and me and Catherine have both been trying to convince our uh spouses, haven't we? Yeah, to go and live on the on the North York Moors or something like that, and just you know, I don't know, go to mass every day.
SPEAKER_03:You could do that, but you still need community because I think that there's a tendency to want to just run off into the woods with just your little clan, but I think there is something still beautiful about community where like the like especially the American suburb, like I don't even know my neighbors and stuff like that. It's kind of like disconnected. Where I I wish we could get back to having like a town center, everybody's got their little plot of land, you have the cathedral in the middle. Like when when I visited Italy, it was like you saw these beautiful cathedrals, and you had the town kind of outspread from it, and so you had like these community centers, and everybody would kind of have their their land off out further from that. And I I really wish we could get back to doing something like that where you still have human community and you're not just hiding in the woods with your family, but I don't know, man. We're so disconnected between technology and all this stuff.
SPEAKER_04:It really shocked me about America, like the strip. Yeah, I didn't understand it at all. Like the first time I you guys don't have anything like that over there, huh?
SPEAKER_01:It felt so big, like it really did feel the scale of everything was huge, and you go in and the shops are huge, and you don't just have a little cafe. Well, New York's a bit different, uh you know, uh New York it does have that village feel to some extent, you know, you've got that. But the parties and everything. But I think this is an opportunity for the church. Again, we hear when we when we often hear the church speaking on matters to do with the environment, it's in step with the secular stuff around the environment. So it's reaching net zero goals. And I think, but this is a real opportunity. It's not that they're wrong to say we are stewards of the earth and we should care for creation, it's not that that's a bad thing and we say who cares. But how do we do that? It's not through political, you know, clearly transparent economic reasons that are lining the pockets of the rich while causing the poor to live in poverty uh so that we can achieve that for them. It's if we actually lived more simply, you know, if we did run off to the forest and so did you and so did all your neighbours, you have that community. You are growing your vegetables, you're sharing your eggs or whatever, but and you are not wasting far more than you need, but you're doing it because this is because this is a like the simple way to live, to be in community around the church, but not because if we go above net zero, we're all gonna be dead in about two months.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it's it's the secular apocalypse that they're trying to push, right? Um, do you remember like when we were younger, like there was something about not wanting to have commercial stuff? Like, I remember when I was younger, it was always about not wanting to fall into getting the name brand thing. Like, you kind of wanted there was this like a culture of I'm trying to think about how to word this. Like, there was this culture of not wanting to fall prey to the corporations and their uh I mean the the hipsters weren't that long ago, bud. Yeah, well that but that's what I mean, right? Like there, but there's nothing like that anymore. Now, like it's everything is commercialized, everybody wants the big brand name thing, things like that. Where I like there was a time where people were like, I'm not gonna fall prey to consumerism. There was like an attempt at it, maybe in the late 90s, early 2000s, or something, and that just seems to have totally vanished. And now everybody just like wants whatever ad TikTok or Instagram throws at them, and they're just such consumers at at this point. It makes me feel hopeless for the next generation.
SPEAKER_01:And because everything's cheaper and easier to get. So, you know, a globalized world, you can get six pairs of trousers or whatever, you know,$10.99 each, where you might have, when we were young, you might have had to purchase one item and it would last you for years until you grew out of it.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I wore the same pair of jeans for you.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, because these weren't these were not cheap items. Um, and I don't think I think you're right, we did have that. Actually, it's interesting because we're all roughly the same age and we have lived, we're sort of the last generation to have lived without the internet, where we were on the cusp and we remember those simple things and and the the ways in which we've we had to communicate and build friendships, and parents had to trust us, and we had to without and now isn't it ironic that the more we can monitor, the more worried we are. We've never had many systems of monitoring. You can put an Apple tag in your kid's rucksack, you can, and yet we're more worried than ever. And when we didn't have that opportunity, we were like three hours.
SPEAKER_03:That really is interesting because when I was a kid, like there, because there were no cell phones yet, like I never had dial up internet because we just didn't have a computer. Like my first computer was my iPhone in like 2007 or something. I never had a computer before that. So growing up, it it it really was, especially during the summers when there was no school. I would wake up, I would leave at 10 a.m. and I just had to be home for dinner. My mom had no idea where I was. I was off gallivanting the neighborhood. Now my wife, like my kids are 21 and 90, and my wife's tracking their every move. She wants to make sure they are where they say they are, she wants to make sure they're safe. It's so and she's more worried now than if they she didn't have that ability to track them and they were just out and they told us where they, you know. It's it really is funny that the the safer you're supposed to be, the more worried you are about safety.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, like COVID. Get your mask on, get your injections, stay six feet apart, and you're drill, this is drilled into you. Be worried, be worried. And do you feel better for it? No, you feel worse, you feel less safe.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, that was terrifying. Our freedom just went that I just stuck two fingers up to be honest, and just did whatever I wanted to do anyway.
SPEAKER_03:Well, I did I had so many fights during that period of time. Like, I started my YouTube channel because I was being told at work that I had to get the shot and stuff, and I was like, I'm not getting it. But um, we are the last of uh I think it's like the analog generation or something. Like, we all had VCRs and cassette tapes, and we did we didn't grow up in middle school with cell phones and high school with cell phones. Like my first cell phone was after I had already graduated. Um, and my first access to the internet was 2007. Like, I never had a computer in my home. I had eight siblings, my parents never had a computer in the house or anything. So if the only exposure I had to the internet before my iPhone would be if I went to a friend's house and they had it and you had that chicken chicken, like that. I never dealt with that in my own personal life, you know.
SPEAKER_02:I I really uh unfortunately missed out on that pre-internet freedom because uh shortly after I was born, there was a famous child abduction uh a few hours away from me. So my mom was super paranoid that we were gonna get a Jacob Wetterling.
SPEAKER_03:Okay, okay. Yeah, we're gonna be able to do that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so my mom was super paranoid. We never got any sort of freedom to go anywhere.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it was a wild time back in back in the in the early 90s growing up in my in my my life. Was it was like I I I was my mom had no idea where I was. Like I was just out, and it would be just be home for dinner, and that would be it. So yeah.
SPEAKER_01:It felt like the same for time, didn't it? It just and maybe where we're living. So like I live in South London now, and I grew up in a home county in the woods. So it's uh mind you, mind you, we did find out about about eight years ago that the the organist at church um who was friendly with my mum and dad, had kids of his own, was arrested for some debauched child porn. And it was clearly uh like had those inclinations. But so there is a sense there is a tendency maybe to think, well, we're safer in a nice rich area or a nice rural area, but sin is sin, right? And sin, sin can it's not always just with the shady looking bloke outside uh the shops or whatever.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and especially with the internet now. Yeah, people people's access to some of these horrible things is way more available now with the internet and stuff. So um, all right, guys, this was a fun conversation, especially because we had nothing planned. Like we really had no we had absolutely no plan coming into this, and I I always know if I talk with you guys, I'm not I'm not worried about where the conversation is gonna go. It's really it's always uh it puts me at ease when I know I have other good conversationalists. So um all right, so what we'll do is Rob will send you guys the file for this. And if you guys want to just release the YouTube portion, if you want to cut anything up, you want to put a clip up, or if you don't want to put it up at all, completely up to you guys. But I think this was a very fun conversation, and I think um, especially towards the end of the YouTube side, we all kind of got a little vulnerable there. So I think anybody that does check it out, they'll get something out of this. So cool.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, well, we want to thank you both very much. We we keep up with your show often after you've recorded because of the time difference, it's not so easy for us.
SPEAKER_04:But one top in the morning, sort it out, we're yeah.
unknown:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:That's just schedule for us, yeah.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:But you but in all seriousness, you you guys are you do a brilliant show, and I think it's it's part the content is so good, but it is also the way in which you just interact in a very easy way, a very natural way. And I think if anyone takes the stuff you say too seriously and is offended, I just think that's ridiculous. You know, it's it's uh it's it's it's a yeah, it's it's just a great, it's a great show. So we likewise encourage on our show people go over and watch you.
SPEAKER_03:Um I am excited to see both of you in two or three weeks, right? We're gonna see each other in three weeks, and I'm gonna drink Mark under the table. We'll have a couple of pints together. Well, I am very excited to see you both in person. So um, thank you both for come. Thank you both for coming on. And uh, yeah, we'll try to we'll try to do these every few months or so. I know it's difficult with the time change and stuff like that, but if Rob and I get like a bank holiday in America where we're both off, maybe we'll do a weekday version of this.
SPEAKER_02:You're the only one that gets those holidays.
SPEAKER_03:You're gonna stop working for those uh Baptists, Rob. Maybe they'll maybe they'll give you off a Yom Kippur and I could take a dangle. Rob works for like these Baptist dispensationalists. It's actually kind of interesting.
SPEAKER_02:They ever saw some of our videos at these subscribe.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, it's trouble. So all right, we uh you're both lovely, and we will see you guys next time. I'll see you guys in a few weeks in person. Cheers, god bless. Thanks. Take us out, Rob.
